keynote

sitting right behind one of the projectors in the main room. head guy (whose name escapes me) talking about the first webvisions in ’01, right after the bubble crash. which iirc hit really damn hard in pdx.

fun, casual, creative, inspiring. which is why I love it.

I have 1 hr ~11 mins left according to my battery clock.

party afterwards…should I invite Tom et al, or just continue with my original plans?

they don’t make predictions! don’t believe predictions, when you hear them. instead, narrow the cone of uncertainty.

sensing the problems, getting insights, and acting.

methodologies (which reminds me much of the research discussed in previous sessions)

cabinet of curiosities, weak signals, wunderkammer. sense making.

208 unread emails. (ack!) “suffocation” and that’s what it feels like. (Bit Literacy book?!) and we’re only scratching the surface.

so this is his collection of “weak signals” of ways that people are finding to deal with this.

15 thousand terabytes. (my barely organized photo collection. MP3s I ripped from CD in 1999. 6 years worth of blog posts.) 800 mb of data created by each person every year, and that’s before the rise of blogs.

stuff that connects to the human body. (like the pedometer I’m wearing right now!) when things start to blog? when every single action is a piece of data, everywhere, anywhere. (Everyware?)

smart dust. weird shit.

geoweb. which gives me that freaky feeling of awe and dismay. (what does location awareness do to people fooling around? or playing hooky? or? or?) and also skin crawling.

how do you deal with the data?

next curve: sensemaking?

a personal digression, if I may: I’m tracking four things in my life right now, all of them collected electronically in one way or another. focusing on those particulars helps, with one thing or another, because I can see the trends, or get excited by the highpoints (27.4 mph!), or look back and remind myself of one thing or another. all of which helps me to be more of the person who I would really like to be.

and the rise of infographics. cabspotting (weren’t they @ sxsw last year?) by stamen design.

art & technology, using the old saw about hemlines & the stock market.

people want to replace the old clock radio with something smarter. chumby? (open source, coming out later this year.) actually this is how I use my cellphone, when my alarm clock last year.

the ambient devices thingamabob. I put their google gadget on my google homepage, and it sucked.

and then the bacon-cooking alarm clock. some coffee makers work this way.

my battery notice is in the red zone, 43 mins remaining. dunno if I’ll make it all the way to the end.

“imakeprojects” 6th sense, vibrations, for wireless networks. (oh, hey, wasn’t that in wired 2 mos ago?) I loved the idea of the guy who could sense direction.

ew. magnet in finger. but he can feel where the wires are in the wall. at this stage, that seems freaking useful.

delicious! yay! also digg, which I’ve never gotten into. and mefi. 🙂 mathowie right over there. and ask mefi, which I’ve found useful a few times. (how I decided not to wear makeup for my job interviews.)

messages at places.

wtf? making sense of nonverbal cues. (ah, the aspergers people, which kicks back to a previous discussion about geeks and depression. would something like that be a reasonable treatment addition in cognitive behavioral therapy?)

BS detector?! I missed the details.

task switching tracking, and remembering what the hell you were doing. program to download: onlife (for mac)

mmmmm…lifehacker. although I never seem to catch up with all the useful things I see there.

continuous partial attention, which can be tiring. oh, hey, that’s why conferences can be so exhausting. “if you drink too much coffee, it gets much worse”

(every so often C tries to get me to monotask for a while, which I find harder than seems appropriate.)

I think I used to have a Firefox extension that did that. (anti-procrastination alert)

mind-hacking. medications. law students using ritalin to study better?! not using it for fun (ala acid, pot, etc) but to be more productive. (freaky.) what happens to the people who aren’t? the anti-narcolepsy drug, not being used by narcoleptics. CX717, people doing better than people who had slept.

(and how does this connect to my experiences with depression & medication?)